Yeah, this game rocked. Hard. The Nadir graphics were breathtaking like uh, something that takes your breath away, AND EVEN THOUGH HE COPPED OUT BECAUSE HE IS A FURRY I still love the game. I'd like to say that Mrwaif displays a level of sophistication that elevates it to a higher plane of being, but I'll settle for giving it a 5 because it's so damn funny.

Aura is the second major release of Dr. Dos', and depending on your perspective on community games like Mooseka Richtlinen mit einer Eisenfaust, may be remembered as his best. It is an action/strategy game hybrid with influences from eastern philosophy, Ikaruga, and of course, ADOM.

In an alternate plane where every being, except of course karmics such as yourself, has an aura of either blue, green, or red, imbalance has occurred and the aurae are struggling against one another. You're out to change all that, even if it means destroying everything in the universe. Dr. Dos refers to these as the 'extinction' endings, comprising three of seven possible conclusions to the game (not counting death), one of the games' most recommending features.

Or perhaps you'd just like to have one aura dominate, and then face the boss of that particular aura and lay down some good ol' fashioned karmic whoop-ass, using your unique ability to change aurae to meet that of your opponents. And you're going to be doing that a lot.

So you run around changing your aura as you meet your opponents. It sounds simple enough, but the levels ascend in difficulty reasonably evenly, and there are one or two that took me four or five save/die/restore attempts to complete. Others are a cakewalk, however. The enemies vary in strength and intelligence, while each aura maintains its own distinct characteristics (red creatures won't even move toward you much if at all, but they hurt a lot if you do contact them - but the blue ones are the true nasties).

One problem with the game is that at points it can get tedious. I would have been interested had Dos included some slightly less action-oriented puzzles - buttons that change the aura of opponents, or open gates, or using objects, or similar linear puzzles, in the vein of the development that craNKGod introduced into Little Square Things. That would have been neat. Some music or sound for the game would also have been nice (said MadTom, who was asked to do just that).

Graphics are one of Dos' self-confessed weaknesses, but what the game lacks in an aesthetic sense is made up for in reasonably in-depth level design and a somewhat addictive, though appropriately simple, premise. I can't, for reasons obvious, comment on the title screen and menu.

Aura is not an easy game. You are not going to beat it, regardless of your choice of ending, without saving/dying/restoring at least a few times. There are several tricks and traps, some obvious and predictable, others quite nasty. You are likely to learn a few strategies ... which aura is best for the very first steps of each level?

The Ultimate Karmic God ending in particular is reasonably (but not incredibly) difficult to get. The only advice I will offer you is to have a good stockpile of health. Actually, that applies to just about every level of the game ... good thing health bonuses are reasonably abundant.

All in all, the game is one of the best uploads to the site this year, appropriately also being the very last one uploaded. Dr. Dos' skill as a ZZTer puts him easily within the range of Quantum P., Commodore, and other present-day whizkids of the ZZTing scene, and I'm very much looking forward to his next release.

With it's astonishing 14 lines of code, 3D talk engine breaks the fourth wall in ZZT, nay, worldwide gaming history. Put aside for a minute the fact that the board you play on only takes up 2.7KB out of the 49KB within the zip file (28KB of that is a .doc file with a total of six lines, one of which is "Finally! After all these years! I?ve reaserched how to make characters that talk in 3d!" Another 14.5KB of that is toolkits which were not made by Mew).

Nobody ever said that a game needed to exceed 3KB to be a success (although it is a requirement of Z2). Nobody said that a game needed to let you move the player more than one time, either. That's right, you move the player in this game a total of one time, but what an exhilarating one time it is.

Didn't I mention the graphics this game possesses? There's a fine looking chap with a red shirt and blue pants on, and for some reason his arm is made up of objects. Why? To up the filesize, no doubt. To the right of the already excellent main feature is a road drawn with the word "amusment" beside it. I am most certainly amused! It doesn't matter that it makes no sense for a vertical road to be going up into the sky in the middle of a black void. It's obviously amusing enough to stand alone. It also doesn't matter that Mew misspelled "amusement" because this game rocks, and that's all that matters. I'm not going to be a grammer Nazi here, folks.

"Finally! After all these years! I?ve reaserched how to make characters that talk in 3d!" - Mew

On to the main feature of the game. The 3D talking. Don't know what it means to talk in 3D? Play this game to find out. Granted, it's not a perfect example of 3D talking, but for a ZZT emulation of it, it's about as close as one could ever wish to get!

"it was truly the zzt-oop triumph of the decade" - Nitr0 (Aka Stiltzkin)

After moving one time you are allowed, you can then touch an object which makes a white object (the character's mouth) turn into #char 255 twice. The game also makes two beeps, as the word "Hello" spouts from the mouth of the square headed character on the left side of the screen.

This is nothing but pure brilliance. It will forever change the way cinemas are made. I don't know a single ZZTer who hasn't made use of the 3D Talk Engine. As Mew tells us at the end of his 28KB .doc file, "Don?t laugh at it, there will be better versions soon." I don't think ANYBODY is laughing, Mew. All I can hear is applause! 5/5.

Mission: Enigma still has me baffled. I could never complete the game. I don't know about the music because I can't hear it with my system. The title screen was really great and well done, too. Gregory Janson is a true master of ZZT!